Duke University Press Log

Call for Papers: Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Translation Issue

The Translation Issue

Guest Editors: David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta

Special Issue on Translating Transgender

Submissions of 4000-9000 words (in any language). Due March 1, 2015 for publication in Spring 2016

Few primary and secondary texts about transgender lives and ideas have been translated from language to language in any formal way over the centuries. Meanwhile, transgender, gender variant, and gender non-confirming people have often been exiles, translators, language mediators, and multilinguals in greater numbers and intensities historically than their cisgender counterparts have. This kind of positionality among languages has become a generative, yet often precarious aspect of trans* embodiment. Nonetheless, the discourses of transgender studies (as in the neighboring fields of LGBT / queer studies) continue to be more Anglophone, more monolingual, and less translated than they historically ought to be, given how the subjects that produced those discourses have often been prototypes of transnational and translingual border-crossing. This paradox continues to constrain disciplinary and conceptual agendas around sexuality and gender a great deal more than in other fields that have enjoyed consistent state and institutional support as well as access to international distribution pathways. This is an important problem for transgender studies in the coming decades because an Anglophone disciplinary and discursive disposition will continue to lead policy-makers, public intellectuals, and academics to fall back on ethnocentric and monolingual frameworks and resources. It perpetuates a hierarchical conceptual economy, with Anglophone and West European linguacultures at the top and trans and queer vernaculars in other languages either at the bottom of the epistemic order, or sequestered into localist, ethnicized, or neo-Orientalist fetish. If not profoundly transformed, how will this discursive hierarchization impact the multi-directional traffic in trans knowledge and ideas in years ahead? This issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly calls for multilingual and translational critique. This may take the form of:

• Essays offering a metacriticism of the field, its terms, and its methodologies from a multilingual point of view
• Essays offering a theoretical problematization of national languages and transnational lingua francae as such from a trans perspective
• Essays exploring the idea of a trans* lingua franca beyond Anglocentricity
• Trans-oriented research that often gets elided precisely because of rhetorical Anglocentricity or methodological monolingualism
• Essays critiquing the relationship between travel and multilingualism in trans* contexts
• Ethnographic studies of multilingual transgender spaces and communities
• Ethnographic studies of medical, legal, penal, educational contexts in which transgender positionality or existence are negotiated translingually
• Reflections on the craft and practice of translation
• Studies on how Anglocentricity in transgender epistemology perpetuates itself—institutionally, methodologically, politically
• Essays exploring how language normativity intersects with racial, ethnic, civic, sexual, erotic, socio-economic normativity in transgender contexts
• Studies that model a “multilingual transgender studies” or a multilingual trans-futurity more broadly
• Case studies on how language frontiers shape the planetary landscape of transgender discourse
• Reflections on the process of translating texts dealing with transgender and gender variance
• Essays on what transgender methodology in translation theory or practice might look like
• Essays exploring what working interpreters and translators (literary, poetic, technical, diplomatic) may reveal about transgender epistemology
• Historical studies linking multilingual, code-switching, and translingual practice with transgender embodiment
• Historical studies linking the genealogy of monolingualism with various kinds of gender normativity

Initial submissions may be in any language and will be peer-reviewed accordingly. Duke University Press requires publication in English, and we will commission translations of accepted submissions in the latter process of review. Accepted submissions will be published in the original language on TSQ’s Web site. Please send a complete manuscript by March 1, 2015 to tsqjournal[at]gmail[dot]com along with a short abstract and brief bio including name and any institutional affiliation. The expected length for scholarly articles is 4000 to 9000 words, and 1000 to 2000 words for shorter works. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous peer review. For articles engaging in scholarly citation, please use the Chicago author-date citation style. Any questions should be addressed to dgl[at]email[dot]arizona[dot]edu.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is co-edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, and published by Duke University Press, with editorial offices at the University of Arizona’s Institute for LGBT Studies. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other issues, visit http://lgbt.arizona.edu/tsq-main. For information about subscriptions, visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/TSQ.

Call for Papers: Reconsidering Gender, Violence and the State

Reconsidering Gender, Violence and the State
Radical History Review issue number 126 (Fall 2016)
Abstract Deadline: February 1, 2015

As emerging scholarship in feminist and queer history makes clear, archives contain surprising histories about gender, sexuality and violence, stories that challenge axiomatic, gendered oppositions of power and vulnerability. This issue of Radical History Review hopes to explore these histories, and reassess conflicting narratives of victimization, subjection, retaliation and self-defense in the context of forms of state authority.

Events and developments over the last two centuries—from the expansion of the provocation defense in the nineteenth century, to the collection of rape testimonies in the early twentieth-century, from the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, to the recent mass kidnapping of girls in Chibok, Nigeria—convey contradictory messages about race, gender, violence and the role of the state as enforcer, perpetrator or protector. Recent calls for critical re-examination of timeworn notions of male violence and female victimhood suggest the need to interrogate longstanding assumptions about the relationships among gender, violence and the powers of the State.

This special issue of Radical History Review invites critical reflection on gendered violence as a historical, intersectional topic of lasting significance. How have conceptions of masculinity and femininity over time informed the persistence of and punishments for gendered violence? What do the archives reveal about the larger structural factors that perpetuate gendered violence? How have feminist and queer organizing efforts to protect and/or avenge victims, further complicated the legal, penal, and legislative efforts to address gendered violence?

Building on contemporary debates and conversations about feminism, its evolving critique of violence, and some of its blind spots, this issue of Radical History Review seeks to reanimate conversations about gender, violence, resistance, victimization, and the role of the state as arbiter among these categories. We hope to engage histories that reveal how gender and violence are mutually constituted categories of personal, political, cultural and legal subjectivity. And we hope to reconsider the ways in which violence – and narratives of violence – can be used to uphold, resist or reshape the ordering structures of the State.

Potential topics might include:

• Gendered violence as an effect of state dominance
• Women as agents of state violence (e.g., in police, prison, and military contexts)
• Gendered violence and vulnerability within the criminal justice enterprise
• “Lost” histories of gendered political violence and/as effects of archive formation
• Unintended consequences of feminist engagements with violence and anti-violence in the law, such as the imbrication of affirmative self-defense claims (e.g. “stand your ground” laws)
• Legal responses to gendered violence, and its race and class implications for incarceration and control
• Gender implications of popular cultural constructions of state violence
• Sexual assault in the military as instantiating institutionalized, hierarchical state power
• Government efforts to decrease violence against women (and forms of gendered violence)
• Compulsory sterilization and chemical castration programs as strategies of state authority and punishment

The RHR seeks scholarly, monographic research articles, but we also encourage such non-traditional contributions as photo essays, film and book review essays, interviews, brief interventions, “conversations” between scholars and/or activists, and teaching notes and annotated course syllabi for our Teaching Radical History section. Preliminary inquiries can be sent to Lisa Arellano ([email protected]), Amanda Frisken ([email protected]), and Erica Ball ([email protected]).

Procedures for submission of articles: At this time we are requesting abstracts that are no longer than 400 words; these are due by February 1, 2015 and should be submitted electronically as an attachment to [email protected] with “Issue 126 submission” in the subject line. By March 31, 2015, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article to undergo the peer review process. The due date for completed drafts of articles is July 1, 2015. An invitation to submit a full article does not guarantee publication; publication depends on the peer review process and the overall shape the journal issue will take. Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word document along with the text. If chosen for publication, you will need to send high-resolution image files (.jpg or .tif files at a minimum of 300 dpi), and secure written permission to reprint all images. Authors must also secure permissions for any other media that they may wish to include with their articles in the online version of the journal. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 126 of Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in Fall 2016.

Abstract Deadline: February 1, 2015
contactrhr[at]gmail[dot]com

Call for Papers: The Gender and Sexuality of Militarization, War and Violence

The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies invites feminist scholars working in any discipline or interdisciplinary area in the interpretive social sciences and humanities to submit area-specific manuscripts on any topic related to the theme of "The Gender and Sexuality of Militarization, War and Violence."

Manuscripts may address any historical period related to any part of the region. Manuscripts are expected to substantiate a thesis based on original scholarship grounded in primary sources (literary, visual, archival, textual, ethnographic, artistic, legal, and so on) and to engage with relevant transnational gender and sexuality scholarship. The highest quality manuscripts will be published as articles in a JMEWS themed issue within approximately a year of submission. Submission guidelines may be found at www.jmews.org 

Manuscripts are due on or before 15 June 2015 to our online submission system here.

Questions may be directed to jmews[at]dukeupress[dot]edu.

Jimmy Creech Celebrates Marriage Equality in NC

Former Methodist minister Jimmy Creech wrote about his experience fighting for marriage equality for same-sex couples in his book Adam's Gift: A Memoir of a Pastor’s Calling to Defy the Church’s Persecution of Lesbians and Gays in 2011. The book is new in paperback this fall. In this post he writes about his joy after a judge overturned North Carolina's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage on Friday afternoon, October 10. 

Like everyone, I didn’t expect and wasn’t prepared for the US Supreme Court’s history-making announcement on Monday, October 6, that opened the door to marriage equality in North Carolina. I expected the court to make a positive ruling, but not before June 2015.

In May, Joni and Gina invited me to officiate at a wedding ceremony for them on October 18. Their plan was to be legally married in the District of Columbia on the 17^th, and have a wedding ceremony the next day with their families and friends. While they badly wanted to be legally married in their home state, waiting until June 2015 was just too long a wait. When the US Supreme Court’s decision made their legal marriage in North Carolina a possibility, the three of us were excited that they might not have to wait. However, because The United Methodist Church had taken my credentials of ordination in 1999 because I violated church law by conducting a wedding for two men, someone else would have to conduct the ceremony on the 18^th for it to be legal.

On Wednesday, I returned home from an errand to find a message on our answering machine. Ken and Steve, and Michael and Mike, had called to ask if I would conduct a double wedding for them on November 15, should a federal judge declare North Carolina’s ban on same-gender marriage unconstitutional. I’ve known both couples for more than twenty years.  Ken and Steve have been together for twenty-eight years and Michael and Mike, for more than twelve. I couldn’t say no to them, and I really wanted to officiate at Joni and Gina’s wedding. But, I didn’t have the credentials.

It was deeply painful to me for many reasons when my credentials were taken away in 1999. Losing the ability to celebrate weddings with loving couples was an especially painful one. Without credentials, I could no longer pronounce a couple married or sign a marriage license. I agonized about what to do now that marriage equality was about to become a reality in North Carolina. I knew I could not regain my credentials from The United Methodist Church; so, I began to search for another way to get the credentials I needed. I discovered the American Marriage Ministries, a non-denominational interfaith church based in Washington State, and was able to obtain from it the necessary credentials to legally officiate weddings.

Friday evening, Chris and I were dressed to go to Durham for a production of The Phantom of the Opera, with our daughter, Natalia. It was late afternoon. We’d waited all day, anticipating an announcement regarding marriage equality in North Carolina. We’d been waiting all week for the announcement, which now seemed wouldn’t come until the following week.  Then the news broke a little before 6:00 PM that US District Court Judge Max Cogburn had declared that the North Carolina constitutional marriage amendment, denying same-gender couples the right to marry, was unconstitutional. When the amendment passed in 2012, the pain was excruciating. With the news of Judge Cogburn’s decision, the joy was extravagant! Dressed for the opera, we went down to the Wake County Justice Center where marriage licenses were being issued to same-gender couples. Phantom would have to wait.

As we approached the Justice Center entrance, we were surprised to find Ken and Steve walking just ahead of us. They were preparing to grill hamburgers when they heard the news. Even though they planned a November wedding and had plenty of time to get their license, they couldn’t wait. The day was too historic not to be part of. They left the hamburgers and hurried to the Justice Center. When Ken and Steve saw us, they immediately asked if I’d officiate their wedding as soon as they got their license instead of waiting so it would be legal right away. I enthusiastically agreed. And, so it happened: on the steps of the Wake County Justice Center, with Chris and Lewie Wells as witnesses, Ken and Steve spoke vows of love and fidelity to each other and I pronounced them married! This was the first legal marriage I’ve been able to do since 1999. Ken and Steve still plan to have their ceremony on November 15 for their families and friends, along with Michael and Mike. Now, I look forward to officiating at the marriage of Joni and Gina on October 18.

Chris and I went to the Justice Center to witness history and to be with the same-gender loving couples who had waited so long to enjoy the rights and protections – and respect – that marriage provides. It was an extraordinary scene, filled with laughter, smiles and tears! Ms. Laura Riddick, the Wake County Register of Deeds, graciously extended the hours of her office from its usual closing time of 5:15 to 9:00 PM to accommodate the couples. Her staff was fantastic, greeting the couples with smiles and patiently guiding them through the application process with sincere kindness. One staff person left her station to bring me a tissue so I could dry the tears from my eyes as I watched Ken and Steve fill out the marriage license application.

I’ve never doubted marriage equality would come to North Carolina, as it will come eventually to all fifty states. I just didn’t expect it to come so swiftly and in such a dramatically surprising way. It was ironic, with all the religion-based arguments in support of the NC marriage amendment, that the case upon which Judge Cogburn’s decision was based was a lawsuit brought by the United Church of Christ and other clergy from around the state. They argued that the marriage amendment denied them the free exercise of religion because it denied them the ability to conduct marriage ceremonies for same-gender couples. Not only did the amendment deny the right of same-gender couples to marry in North Carolina and legal recognition to couples married in other states, the amendment made conducting same-gender marriages a punishable illegal act for clergy.

Beyond being history-making, the advent of marriage equality in North Carolina inaugurates a reality of stability, security and protection for same-gender couples heretofore unknown on a personal level. Last night, I saw same-gender couples leaving the Justice Center, walking toward the heart of Raleigh holding hands with a newfound sense of freedom, equality and dignity. Bigotry dies hard and much more work is necessary to achieve full legal equality and social acceptance for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. A big step was taken in North Carolina toward its ultimate demise on Friday, October 10, 2014. We can celebrate!

 

Tikkun Wins 2014 Magazine of the Year Award

Tikkun Managing Editor Alana Price accepts the RNA 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award. Credit: Dawn Cherie Araujo.

Congratulations to Tikkun, winner of the prestigious 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award from the Religion Newswriters Association! The Religion Newswriters Association's awards recognize journalism excellence by measuring a magazine's grasp on a diversity of religion issues.

Tikkun, published quarterly, offers analysis and commentary that strive to bridge the cultural divide between religious and secular progressives. By bringing together voices from many disparate religious and secular humanist communities to talk about social transformation, political change, and the evolution of our religious traditions, Tikkun creates space for the emergence of a religious Left to respond to the influence of the religious Right and the distortions of global capitalism, while simultaneously critiquing reductionist views that sometimes prevail in liberal and progressive circles.

The most recent issue of Tikkun is available online here. To subscribe to Tikkun, visit www.tikkun.org.

To learn more about the award, please visit www.tikkun.org/rna.

 

Happy Birthday, Rachel Carson!

In celebration of what would have been Rachel Carson’s 107th birthday tomorrow, we are happy to honor her legacy with a post including several journal articles that relate to her life and work. Famous for Silent Spring (1962) among many other projects, Carson is credited with influencing the modern environmental movement and inspiring a change in national pesticide policy and a nationwide ban on DDT for agricultural uses.

 

In “Spinster Ecology,” Sarah Ensor investigates the role of futurity in queer ecocriticism how the figure of a spinster can help to resolve tensions between two schools of thought. Read an excerpt:

Attempting to discredit Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson wrote to Dwight D. Eisenhower and asked ‘why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics.’ Benson’s attack, its misogyny at best thinly veiled, makes legible one of the central challenges to developing a queer ecocritical practice: the status of futurity. Contemporary environmentalism, especially given the recent emphasis on sustainability, tends to be future-oriented, its rhetoric predicated on matters of inheritance and procreation alike…. Much recent queer theory, by contrast, insistently resists futurity, marked as it often is by heteronormative imperatives. What does it mean, then, to develop a queer ecocriticism?

To read more from “Spinster Ecology,” click here.

 

“The New York School of Urban Ecology” by Jamin Creed Rowan argues that Rachel Carson’s ecological voice helped change the tone of the New Yorker and “helped solidify a literary and intellectual tradition that infused the city’s social networks with social value.” Read an excerpt:

Although Rachel Carson is perhaps best remembered for dramatizing the environmental consequences of pesticide in Silent Spring (1962), many readers first discovered here in the New Yorker writing about the sea--not DDT. Edith Oliver, a staff editor at the New Yorker, recommended Carson’s manuscript for The Sea Around Us to editor-in-chief William Shawn in 1950. Shawn was even more enthusiastic about this relatively unknown naturalist and offered to buy nine of the book’s fourteen chapters. He then condensed these chapters and published them, rather unusually, as a three-part series in June 1951 under the magazine’s “Profiles” rubric. While recognizing the significance of Carson’s New Yorker publications for her subsequent career, critics have found it difficult to explain her appearance in a magazine targeted, according to founder Harold Ross, at ‘persons who have a metropolitan interest.’

To read more from “The New York School of Urban Ecology,” click here.

 

Articles:

“Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity,” by Sarah Ensor in a special issue of American Literature, “Ecocriticism,” volume 84 and issue 2 (June 2012).

“The New York School of Urban Ecology: The New Yorker, Rachel Carson, and Jane Jacobs,” by Jamin Creed Rowan in American Literature, volume 82 and issue 3 (September 2010)

 

Jews in America: Our Conflicted Heritage

May is Jewish American Heritage Month. Please enjoy this guest post by Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine. Named after the Jewish concept of mending and transforming a fragmented world, Tikkun offers analysis and commentary that strive to bridge the cultural divide between religious and secular progressives.

In addition to editing Tikkun, Rabbi Lerner is chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives, and the author of eleven books, including Jewish Renewal, The Politics of Meaning, Spirit Matters, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right, and Embracing Israel/Palestine. He is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley and San Francisco, California.

 

On the one hand, Jews are deeply grateful that America provided us with a safe haven when so many other Christianity-dominated cultures had represented us as demon Christ-killers and created the preconditions for the rise of both secular and religious anti-Semitism. American Jews rejoiced in the promise of freedom and equality before the law, and played a major role in organizing, shaping, and leading social movements that could extend that promise to all of America’s citizens. The role of the United States in defeating Nazism at the expense of so many American lives remains an enduring source of pride even for the grandchildren and great grandchildren of those who fought in World War II, and an enduring source of appreciation for this amazing country. And the generosity of the American people toward Jews has made it possible for us to thrive and feel the kind of safety we haven’t felt for two thousand years of exile and diaspora.

On the other hand, Jewish well-being in America came not because this society didn’t seek scapegoats, but rather because it already had a scapegoat long before most Jews arrived on these shores—African Americans, Native Americans, and other targets (most recently, feminists, homosexuals, and “illegal” immigrants). While other immigrant groups from Europe found their safety in part by identifying with the dominant culture and becoming “white” (a social construct for all light-skinned people who bought into the existing systems of privilege and power), a significant section of the Jewish people in the past 150 years of presence in the United States chose instead to identify with the oppressed—most significantly with African Americans, but also with the poor (of which we were a significant part in the years 1880-1940), the oppressed, the homeless, and the hungry.

Was this simply a matter of self-interest from a new immigrant group seeking to find a way to integrate into the society? If so, why wasn’t it chosen with equal energy by the Irish, the Polish, the Italians, etc.? In my view, Jews chose this path because of two radical messages in the Torah:

1. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, that you were “the Other” (ha’ger), so when you come into your own power, do not oppress the stranger, but instead, Love the Other.

2. Do not accept reality as it is currently constructed—there is a force in the universe that makes possible the transformation from “that which is” (reality as given) to “that which ought to be” (the utopian possibilities of a world based on love, generosity, social justice, peace and joyous celebration of the universe). We called it YHVH—mistranslated as Jehovah, but actually a concept rather than a name, calling our attention to the reality that the world could be fully transformed and that we humans were created in the image of that force and with the responsibility to do tikkun (the healing and transformation of the world). It was this heritage that seeped into the collective unconscious of the Jewish people and that made us flock to social change movements in numbers not only out of proportion to our percentage of the population, but also more frequently than many other immigrant groups.

Unfortunately, the allure of fitting in and becoming like everyone else had a particularly strong effect on the distinctively American kind of Judaism that emerged in the temples and synagogues of American life. Seeking to imitate the decorum and respectability that WASPS had shaped for themselves, Jews in America created a Judaism that became increasingly like the other conformist religions of American society, embracing capitalist values and embracing patriotism even when it led to supporting American imperialist assumptions about the rest of the world. This new American Juadism sought to empty itself of its connection to the awe, wonder, and radical amazement at the universe that had been central to the Judaism of the past. Who can blame those in the post-Holocaust American Jewry who wanted safety and security? Yet the Judaism they tried to pass on to their children lacked the spiritual depth and political radicalism that had been at the heart of Judaism’s appeal.

The result? An increasing disaffection with Judaism in post-1950s America, and with it a decline in the ability of subsequent generations to find within Judaism its spiritual depth or its challenge to the materialism and selfishness that increasingly have come to dominate both public and private life in the early twenty-first century. But if Judaism was merely Americanism, our children asked, then why should they have to bother with all the distinctive religious practices meant to keep Jews a distinct religion, and why bother with a God that urged us to challenge the status quo when that status quo seemed so welcoming and its material benefits so enticing?

So this is the conflict that remains the enduring heritage of American Jews: an internal tension over whether to adopt mainstream values and a celebration of “that which is,” thereby fitting in with the cultural assumptions of the world’s largest imperial power, or to challenge those values, a challenge which not only leads to “speaking truth to power” in the larger society but also to challenging the Jewish community’s blind loyalty to an Israeli state that itself is committed to being “a nation like all other nations,” with its blindness to the suffering of the Palestinian people and its arrogance and hypocrisy as it attempts to turn Judaism into a cheerleader for immoral policies.

The good news is that even as many young Jews reject Judaism, they nevertheless have inherited a memory of the values that Judaism sought to inspire, and so many have joined in a wide variety of prophetic enterprises to reclaim Jewish spirituality and/or rebuild a Jewish social justice consciousness. This social justice consciousness goes far beyond the paltry platitudes of the Democratic Party and proclaims the need for a radical reconstruction of our world to save it from the environmental destruction that our Torah taught us would be the inevitable consequence of failing to build a society based on justice, love, generosity, and environmental sensitivity. We at Tikkun magazine, which is published by Duke University Press, are in the vanguard of this movement, on the one hand building a Jewish renewal spiritually and politically, and on the other hand recognizing that the global changes that are needed require an overcoming of all forms of national chauvinism and embracing a new ethos: the caring society—caring for each other and caring for the earth.

In this way, the particularism of American Judaism is morphing into a universalism. To help that happen, we have created the Network of Spiritual Progressives, an interfaith group that is welcoming to secular humanists of every stripe as well. The Network of Spiritual Progressives calls for a New Bottom Line in the United States and around the world, based on our understanding that our well-being as Jews and as Americans depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and the well-being of the planet itself.

Perhaps the Network of Spiritual Progressives, with its call for a Global Marshall Plan and an Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which would require public funding of all national and state elections, banning all other monies in elections from any private or corporate or political source and requiring the larger corporations to prove a satisfactory history of social and environmental responsibility every five years to a jury of ordinary Americans) may be the fullest realization of the American Jewish Heritage. And it is in supporting, nay insisting, that the only practical and realistic way to save the planet from environmental destruction and/or some new form of elitist plutocratic fascism is to be prophetic, unrealistic, and utopian that Jews in America may still have an important role to play.

"Archives and Archiving," a CFP for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly

The latest call for papers for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly volume 2 and issue 4, "Archives and Archiving", edited by Aaron Devor and K.J. Rawson, has just been released.

This issue of TSQ will investigate practical and theoretical dimensions of archiving transgender phenomena and will ask what constitutes “trans* archives” or “trans* archival practices.” 

While transgender-related experiences have long been captured by archives to some extent, the last few decades have witnessed an increased commitment to collecting trans* materials. Consequently, sizable trans* collections can now be found in a range of institutional contexts including grassroots archives, nonprofit organizations, and university-based collections.

Given this trend, myriad practical considerations that trans* materials present for archiving warrant further attention. What should or should not be included in trans* archives? What are the best practices for acquiring, processing, preserving, and making transgender materials accessible? Given practical limitations of space and money, how do we decide what to prioritize? And who decides? What are the implications for history when archivists make such decisions? How should archives negotiate ethical concerns specific to trans* archives? What relationship—if any—do trans* materials have to broader LGBTQ collections? What cataloguing tools are available and how do they obscure, distort, or make meaning of the lived experiences of trans* people? What are the benefits and limitations of using “transgender” or “trans*” as umbrella terms in an archival context? How are archivists and archival practices changed by the challenges of dealing with trans* materials? What role can digital technologies play in collecting and accessing trans* materials, particularly born-digital materials?

These practical considerations would be incomplete without a closely related theoretical exploration of trans* archiving. How, for example, are bodies representable (or unrepresentable) through archival documents? How can embodiment itself be considered an archive of memory and feeling, a sedimentation of social practices, a living medium for the transmission of cultural forms? What power do archives have in shaping popular understandings of transgender phenomena? How are researchers affected by their encounters with archival materials? How do archives steer researchers in particular ways with metadata, organizational systems, and finding aids? Can archives help construct community and personal identity? Does digitization inherently change trans* historical artifacts? 

We welcome submissions of full-length academic articles on a wide range of topics related to trans* archives and archiving. Such topics might include:
• practical and philosophical considerations for developing transgender collections independently or within broader archives
• how transgender archival materials intersect with and depart from LGBQ archival materials
• critical reflections on working in trans* archives and/or with trans* archival materials
• sex, desire, and pornographic collections
• considerations of the body within and as represented by archives
• understandings of embodiment itself as an archive of affects, memory, practices, and social forms
• capturing lived experiences with archival artifacts and ephemera
• recontextualizing historical materials within the context of the archive
• affective encounters 
• ethics of historical representation
• archival temporality and considerations of time and timeliness
• the role of archivists
• institutionality of government, state, academic, non-profit, and grassroots collections
• processing and interpreting trans*-related materials
• hidden collections
• archival language practices, cataloguing, and classification
• digital technologies within archives, digital archiving, and archiving born-digital materials
• intersectional identities
• access and accessibility
• archival activism

We will also consider for publication shorter essays, opinion pieces, first-person accounts, practical advice, how-to guides, or interesting archival documents. We encourage contributions from a wide range of authors including academics, independent researchers, archivists, and activists. 

Please send a complete manuscript by October 15, 2014 to tsqjournal[at]gmail.com along with a brief bio including name and any institutional affiliation. The expected length for scholarly articles is 5,000 to 7,000 words, and 1,000 to 2,000 words for shorter works. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous peer review. For articles engaging in scholarly citation, please use the Chicago author-date citation style. Any questions should be addressed by e-mail to both guest editors for the issue: Aaron Devor(ahdevor[at]uvic.ca) and K.J. Rawson (kjrawson{at]holycross.edu). We plan to respond to submissions by early January 2015. Final revisions will be due by March 1, 2015.

About the journal
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is co-edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, and published by Duke University Press, with editorial offices at the University of Arizona’s Institute for LGBT Studies. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other issues, visit http://lgbt.arizona.edu/tsq-main. For information about subscriptions, visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/tsq.

Chavez Behind the Camera

A guest post by Emily Dings, Managing Editor of American Literature.

As a new biopic about Cesar Chavez arrives in theaters just in time for Cesar Chavez Day, a collaboration between American Literature and Scalar (a multimedia authoring and publishing web platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture) draws our attention to Chavez’s own interest in film as a revolutionary technology for farm-worker activism. Curtis Marez’s Scalar project “Cesar Chavez’s Video Collection” is part of American Literature’s special issue on New Media and American Literature (December 2013, 85:4). Comprising a traditional print volume and four open-access digital projects, the issue is the first collaboration of its kind for the journal.

Read an excerpt:

The fact that technology has been both an object and means of farm-worker media making has encouraged self-reflexive strategic efforts to transform postwar visual culture. Farm-worker unions did not simply change what audiences saw, but instead attempted to alter how they saw agribusiness, intervening in the hierarchical relations of looking that structured the agribusiness-dominated mediascape, and instead promoting new kinds of activist spectatorship among farm workers and their supporters. This project thus focuses on struggles over technology in general and visual technologies in particular, including moving picture cameras, video cameras and players, and computer screens. 

 “Cesar Chavez’s Video Collection” is an offshoot of Marez’s book Speculative Technologies: Migrant Workers and the Hidden History of New Media (forthcoming, Duke University Press), and is available on the Scalar platform here.

The Cultural Impact of the Olympics

Over the years, several Duke University Press journal articles have addressed the cultural impact of the Olympics. Take a break from watching the 2014 Winter Games to sample these articles.

Erica Rand, "Court and Sparkle: Kye Allums, Johnny Weir, and Raced Problems in Gender Authenticity," in "The Athletic Issue," a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, volume 19 and issue 4, 2013.

Read an excerpt from the article:

At a press conference he initiated to address the gender-test incident, Weir called the terms masculine and feminine "very old fashioned," adding, "There's a whole generation of people that aren't defined by their sex or their race or by who they like to sleep with." My own paradise would not involve throwing out masculinity and femininity or sex and race all together. They can serve as sources of pleasure, strength, community, and solidarity, inside and outside the sport, in ways that do not require policing them. If people of all genders could express, present, or perform in sport in whatever gendered ways they wanted to--which might or might not match up with the way they present themselves in other contexts--that would make for a more joyous sport. But Weir's distaste for having people define others by those terms gestures to effects of gender policing beyond fitting people into categories. As he states in Welcome to My World, being called "flamboyant" instead of "athlete" is another.

To read more from "Court and Sparkle," click here. 

 

Sally Anne Duncan, "Souls Grown Deep and the Cultural Politics of the Atlanta Olympics" in "Performance, Politics, and History," a special issue of Radical History Review, number 98, Spring 2007.

Read an excerpt from the article at the African American performance group Souls Grown Deep:

Unprecedented as it was, Souls Grown Deep was forced to the periphery of the Olympic stage. A vital opportunity was missed to give international visibility to the South’s unique community of African American self-taught artists. This essay examines the social and cultural processes that exalted a banal global art show while suppressing a landmark African American visual performance. This is a case study of the cultural politics of Atlanta, the vested interests of the fine art and folk art worlds, and, most of all, of the performative power of art exhibitions themselves. In Atlanta, the experiential knowledge embedded in the African American artists’ modes of creation and communication in Souls Grown Deep provided a potent social counterpoint to a falsely transcendent Olympic vision embodied in Rings.

To read more from "Souls Grown Deep," click here.

Amy Bass, "Objectivity Be Damned, or Why I Go to the Olympic Games: A Hands-On Lesson in Performative Nationalism," in "The Pleasure Principle: Sport for the Sake of Pleasure," a special issue of SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly, volume 105 and issue 2, 2006.

Read an excerpt from the article:

My relationship with the Olympics continued after my dissertation was complete and I began my life as a professor at Plattsburgh State University. Within months of arriving in Plattsburgh, I audaciously asked if I could leave the following fall semester to go with NBC in a supervisor role to the Sydney Games. I was indoctrinated: I was part of a small group of highly specialized people who drop everything for several weeks during an Olympic year and gather together, working for whatever network is broadcasting the Games. It is a unique group, knowledgeable in multiple languages, geography, world politics, and specific random sports (from gymnastics to curling to judo, in which it is legal, by the way, to break your opponent's arm as a means to win). Plattsburgh graciously worked out a way for me to go, which included teaching an honors seminar--The Black Athlete--online from Sydney. I returned with more life-altering experiences: watching Marion Jones run, sitting in the bleachers as the United States beat Cuba for the baseball gold medal and listening to rumors that Castro was in the house, and again witnessing a spectacular Closing Ceremony. I reworked the dissertation after returning from Sydney, and by the time Salt Lake City rolled around I was in the final editing phases of my book, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympic Games and the Making of the Black Athlete, more confident than ever of the viability of sports, especially the Olympics, as a fruitful site to examine how the world works, whether in terms of my own focus on exploring how ideas of race and nation are culturally manufactured, or the broader goals of determining where in the world politics exists.

To read more from "Objectivity Be Damned," click here.